Retinal Biometric for Securing JPEG-Codec Hardware IP Core for CE Systems

Fake/pirated hardware intellectual property (IP) cores integrated in consumer electronics systems can cause reliability hazards and jeopardize the safety of end consumer. Robust detection and isolation of such pirated IP cores before integration is therefore crucial. Existing approaches do not provide robust security against replication or evasion of IP detection resulting into higher probability of coincidence (Pc) and lesser tamper tolerance (TT) compared to the proposed approach. Further, compared to existing biometric based hardware security methodologies, the proposed approach provides more distinctive features and does not require image enhancement; while compared to non-biometric based hardware security methodologies, the proposed approach provides natural uniqueness and non-replicability of features through retinal image. This paper presents a novel retina biometric-based hardware security methodology for securing JPEG compression-decompression (CODEC) hardware IP core against IP piracy. The proposed result reports the following: (a) variation in Pc metric for different sizes of embedded retinal signature and different retinal images (b) variation of TT for proposed approach for different retinal images (c) security comparison of proposed approach with facial, fingerprint biometric and encrypted digital signature-based hardware security approaches (d) Pc-design cost tradeoff for proposed retinal biometric approach. Results indicate enhancement in security at zero design overhead.